Comparing Descartes Meditations On First Philosophy

Descartes and Hume are two very famous philosophers who had very distinct and competing beliefs about God. Descartes was a rationalist and Hume was an empiricist, therefore both had different restrictions on our ability to have knowledge on God. Rationalist claim that our knowledge is gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the source of all our concepts and knowledge. In Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes attempts to prove that there is knowledge that God exists. On his journey to doing this he examines the idea of being a thinking thing, the concept of clear and distinct ideas, cause and effect, and the fact that he is imperfect to conclude that God exists. Hume mentions in
By proving this, he mentions the idea of experience and how knowledge of things can only come from experience. As Descartes proves that God exists in his mediations, there are very clear flaws that arise, thus causing Hume’s idea of God’s existence to be more reliable than Descartes. Descartes first approaches the idea of the existence of God in his third meditation: Concerning God, That He Exists. He starts out with an idea he mentioned earlier in the Meditations on First Philosophy about how he is a thinking thing. “ I am a thing that thinks, that is to say, a thing that doubts, affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things, wills, refrains from willing, and also imagines and senses” (Descartes, 24). This is the first thing that Descartes knows to be true. He says, “What about thinking? Here I make my discovery: thought exists; it alone cannot be separated from me. I am; I exist- this is certain” (Descartes, 19). He goes on to say that his senses are deceptive and whatever he may understand from his senses may be false, therefore he cannot rely on them. He then tries to
For example, why can Descartes not come up with the idea of God? The meditator believes that, “ Hence it follows that something cannot come into being out of nothing, and also that what is more perfect (that is what contains in itself more reality) cannot come into being from what is less perfect” (Descartes, 28). He is capable of understanding that he is an imperfect being, therefore, he is able to understand what a perfect being must be – which is the opposite of him. If he knows what a perfect being is then he could come up with the idea of God himself, yet he claims he is unable to put the thought of such a being in his head. Descartes also contradicts himself in Mediation Five when he says that God is perfect. Based on the definition of perfect, God would be unconditionally benevolent. This is not true because injustice is very prevalent in the world. This may mean that God might fail to hold other attributes that are perfect, thus not actually being perfect. If God is not perfect he may not exist according to Descartes because one of Descartes attributes he assigns to his concept of a perfect God is existence. The order in which Descartes proves the existence of God can cause some problems as well. Descartes assigns God with attributes before actually proving that God exists. He does this in Meditation Five. What is bad about this is that Descartes reasoning